Communication systems have grown increasingly complex in today's society. One aspect associated with communications relates to errors or noise. High levels of errors or noise may result in traffic loss or significant degradations in the quality of data such that the resulting/surviving data is unusable. Additionally, data traffic that experiences significant noise conditions may require retries, which can expend valuable network resources.
In certain scenarios where traffic is distributed across multiple links, a myriad of additional configuration problems associated with errors or noise may occur. For example, when many smaller packets are multiplexed into a larger one, an error may be generated on a corresponding T1/E1 line. Noise or errors that cause corruption of a single timeslot of a T1 line may result in a single packet being lost in a normal network. When multiplexing is used, the corruption of a single timeslot may cause multiple packets to be lost, thus amplifying packet loss for the communication flow. Thus, a problem exists where an errored frame is encountered and an entire frame segment (often referred to as a ‘superframe’) is discarded even in cases when some of the included subframes may not have errors.
Such deficiencies may inhibit system performance and force valuable bandwidth to be underutilized or wasted. Operations that accommodate a suitable level of noise at the expense of sacrificing valuable T1/E1 lines are not feasible for service providers. Accordingly, the ability to provide a communications system that consumes few resources, optimizes bandwidth, and addresses error/noise characteristics properly presents a significant challenge for network designers, service providers, and system administrators.